ABSTRACT
It was John Smith, the former Labour Party leader, in the early 1990s who first referred to devolution as ‘the settled will of the Scottish people’. By the time of his untimely death, devolution had moved from being a secondary to a primary issue on the Scottish political agenda. In 1997 it was endorsed emphatically in a referendum, and through eight years of Labour-Liberal Democrat governments, led by Donald Dewar (1999-2000), Henry McLeish (2000-2001) and Jack McConnell (2001-2007) the revived Scottish Parliament appeared to consolidate its centrality to the future of Scottish politics. In 2007, with the election of Scotland’s first ever nationalist administration led by Alex Salmond (as First Minister) the current devolution settlement is no longer looking so ‘settled’.
